Milena Jovicevic

When I met with Milena Jovicevic she
had just returned from Venice, where she had her hair cut. This was no ordinary
haircut, however. It was, in fact, part of a performance piece orchestrated by
artist Sislej Xhafa for the Venice Biennale. He hired a professional
hairdresser, and reserved a special place for the coiffing to take place – a
tree. Milena had to strap on a harness after her 13-hour drive to Venice, climb
the tree (fitted eloquently with a barber pole) and sit to get her haircut. The
piece was part of Xhafa’s representation for the Italian Pavilion at the
Biennale, which focused on the theme of the binaries that come to define
our identity.

Milena’s own performances and
interactive works of art, however, are usually focused on one particular binary –
that of male and female. The artist is interested in the tension between
traditional women’s roles in Montenegro and the former Yugoslavia, and the new,
emancipated woman that emerged after the break-up of Yugoslavia and the end of
Tito’s socialism. So, on the one hand, you have the traditional grannies wearing
headscarves and black dresses, and the younger generation, in the same family,
where the woman embraces her role as an object of desire – also in a black
dress, but perhaps a more ‘little’ one.

To illustrate this dichotomy, for
example, Milena created a glass foosball table, which cannot be played. The
players, along with the table, are made entirely out of glass, demonstrating
the fragility of this situation that women find themselves in nowadays. The two
generations of women are competing against one another, but they cannot
actually fight it out. The piece is called Man
Games (2011), as all of these roles that women take on (the good wife, the
sex object) are ultimately defined by their relation to the opposite sex.

She continued this theme with Free Sugar, lollipops made of sugar and
caramel that were shaped like muscular, well-built men. The visitors to the
exhibition were meant to consume these candies, and some found the task
difficult. (One can’t help but wonder whether female-shaped lollipops would
have been easier to stomach.) The idea reminded me Polish artist Natalia L.L.’s Consumer Art from 1972, where a model
was photographed eating sexually suggestive objects, such as a banana and hot
dog. Here, however, it is the viewer that becomes the consumer, quite
literally, of the work of art, and of the male body. The theme of consumption
is one that has occupied artists since the post-War era, but in Milena’s work,
the tables are turned, and now it is the male body that is being consumed.

It is not only the male body that is
the object of consumption in Milena’s work. At the opening of the exhibition PAY & P(L)AY in 2013, the artist
created visa credit cards of sparkling gold plastic, with the lone digit “0”
occupying the center. The cards were just plastic, without an active magnetic
strip, but people took them to nearby shops and tried to use them to purchase
real items. As Milena told me, they urged the shopkeepers to keep trying to put
the transactions through, but the cards, without a qualifying bank behind them,
couldn’t purchase anything. Present in the exhibition hall was Milena’s
custom-made abacus, an ancient tool for calculating purchases and debts. In our
oversexed society, however, the beads on the abacus have now grown nipples, and
are stuck together in pairs – like real boobs. Just as the tension between old
and young was made manifest in her foosball table, here an old fashioned adding
machine is modernized by being outfitted with the female anatomy, for each of
its users to (willingly or unwillingly) consume.

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Milena observes how everything in our
society is vulgarized – whether it is relating to sex, objectification,
consumption, etc.. She draws attention to that fact using humor and irony to
draw the viewer in, and challenge his or her received ideas about those aspects
of society. We consume sex on a daily basis without even knowing or realizing
it. Milena makes this consumption overt, saturating our visual sphere with
re-sexualized objects such as lollipops and calculating machines.